Quoddy

yet, but some of the ideas I'm toying with harken back to the old idea of "compound documents"[6] and "intelligent documents"[7], or something like Bret Victor's "reactive documents" stuff[8]. Outside of all that, I plan to finish reading Permutation City by Greg Egan, and Philip C. Jackson's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. [1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy [2]: https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=283 [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Management_Interoperabi... [4]: http://wave.apache.org [5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation [6]: http://www.w3.org/2004/CDF/ [7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_document [8]: http://worrydream.com/Tangle/

could say the idea here is to bring the Linked Data approach inside the enterprise. I can't promise anything definite, but as with any commercially backed open source project, the possibility is always open that if somebody contributes to the project and kicks ass, that we may be able to find (or create) a spot for that person at Fogbeam at some point. All commercial notions aside, we are working on some wicked cool stuff, especially the semantic web stuff, and would welcome anybody who wants to get involved. At worst, we'll all learn some stuff and have some fun together.

mantic query support. Coming down the pipe will be some rad visualizations and just generally more support for different ways to navigate the "knowledge space" that is entailed by related content, people, events and tasks. For me, this is a classic "win win" because I get to have fun working with cool tech: machine learning / big data (Mahout, Hadoop, etc.), Event Stream Processing, Semantic Web stuff (Stanbol, Jena, Fuseki, etc.) and because we're building some stuff that I think we're going to be able to monetize. Build awesome tools AND make money from it? That sounds like my idea of fun. :-)

re threshold, or is tagged with a certain tag. We'll also be implementing "channel filters" soon, which let you filter a given channel (sorta like a sub-reddit) down to just the entries that match your criteria. And we've got some mondo gnarly semantic content enhancement / analysis stuff coming down the pipe in the next few months... Unfortunately there aren't proper installers yet and the documentation is pretty weak, but if anyone is interested in giving it a spin, feel free to ping me for assistance. And we'll get the doco squared away at some point and get some tooling but to make installation / configuration easier (yeah, this stuff is an "on premises" play for now). [1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy [2]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick

So if you wanted to, for example, define a "marketing" channel and point it all the popular marketing blogs, you could do that. Or you could create a "techies" channel, point it at Hacker News, Techcrunch, GroovyBlogs.org, etc. Whatever makes sense. OK, so given a Reddit like thing, where we are starting to do some different stuff is here... we are implementing what we call "triggers" and "filters" to give a user more control over what happens with content in the system. Filters let you filter a channel down to only those entries that match certain criteria (title keyword, body keyword, score, submitter, etc.). Triggers are a similar notion, but they fire in reaction to events like "new entry posted", "entry tagged", "entry voted on", etc., and allow users to hook an action to the event. So you can arrange to, for example, have an entry emailed if it hits a certain score or receives a certain tag. We also have an explicit "share" button that we attach to entries that allows you to share the entry via email, XMPP, or via a RESTful POST (in ActivityStrea.ms format) to a URL. Right now we are focused on using that feature to allow users to "share" entries to our other product, Quoddy[2], which is an Enterprise Social Network. As an ESN, it lets you do all the kinds of things you might imagine an ESN doing, and we're working now on Semantic Web integration so we can do automatic content enrichment, etc. So yeah, I'm a big fan of technological tooling for sharing information and knowledge in an office setting. Now, the kinds of things we're building, I think, start to have the most value once an organization gets to a certain threshold of size/complexity (say, 500 employees or more). A 10 person company might be able to get by with just an email list or something a lot simpler than our thing. Honestly, we're building mainly for bigger companies, as our ESN has SOA/ESB integration, BPM integration and a lot of "enterprise" stuff (which stands to reason, seeing as it's an "enterprise" social network! :-) ) Obviously I think that information / knowledge sharing are important, or we wouldn't be working on this stuff. But here's where it gets more interesting in my opinion... if all you do is share links, blurbs, whatever, you gain some value from that, but you don't gain the maximum value from it. You can email your office a link to a great article about, say, a new programming technique that you think should be adopted, or a new marketing approach, and it's very easy for it to just disappear into the ether, for various reasons. We think this kind of information sharing should have deeper hooks into how people actually get work done, and should support tooling to help A. keep things from getting lost, B. route just the right information to just the right people, and C. provide context to help support decision making. That's why we thing things like BPM and ESB integration are important to an ESN.. imagine if somebody shares a link to a document, and when you view it, you get pointers to open workflow User Tasks which are related to that document, or to recent business events which have some connection to that document. Or, imagine if you have a button you can click that takes the link that got shared, and actually starts a workflow around it. One thing about this stuff though... culture is huge. Some companies are a good fit for this kind of stuff, and some aren't. Companies that are very "flat" organizationally, that promote empowered employees and widespread collaboration, will love this stuff. Companies that are heavy on top-down, command & control hierarchy, that are very divisive politically, where knowledge hoarding is practiced, etc., won't use this stuff even if you implement it. Anyway, if you ever want to bat some ideas around offline, feel free to shoot me an email. Information sharing / knowledge management / collaboration are kind of my passion, so I'm always interested in talking about this stuff. [1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick [2]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy

ve a user the ability to get the "best of both worlds" and view their content in a fashion akin to the way Google Reader (or other readers) work, OR view it "in stream" ala a G+ or Facebook style news stream. When you take a step back and look at it, in many ways, a "wall" or "stream" isn't that different than an "inbox", and one wonders if you can't find a neat way to collapse all of this "stuff" (email, rss feeds, social "status updates", etc.) into one interface. Anyway, call me bullish on syndication, but I almost feel like we need a song titled You Can't Stop RSS set to the tune of Twisted Sister's You Can't Stop Rock and Roll.[2] [1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy/tree/prhodes [2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaehBH7DtR4

it would help with the "abandoned project" thing, since there would be more of a sense of "go here and discuss whose repo is going to become the new mainline" etc.

m them, so we'd have to go dig through their fork and sift through it to figure out what to bring over. Now, our project might not have generated much interest from other hackers for a lot of reasons... it's a niche area (enterprise social networks), is written in Groovy (which is popular, but nowhere near as popular as some other languages), and we haven't really done that much to market the project. But that's kinda the point - going OSS can result in lots of outside developers jumping in to contribute, but it by no means guarantees that they will. [1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy

selling proposition", "solution selling", "SPIN selling", etc. have entered my lexicon. What don't you like about marketing? It's hard. And I'm a n00b at it. Therefore it sucks. No, really, it's kind of fun in a way, and I enjoy learning and stretching myself in new directions. But it can be frustrating dealing with so many things that I haven't had to worry about in the past. [1]: http://www.fogbeam.com [2]: http://www.fogbeam.com/products.html [3]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick [4]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy [5]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Heceta [6]: http://www.quora.com/Who-are-Jives-competitors [7]: http://fogbeam.blogspot.com [8]: https://twitter.com/fogbeamlabs